All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [101]
He looked about.
They were still in the alley—but it was wrong.
He and Jezebel stood in a deserted side passage off the main thoroughfare. Eliot hadn’t seen this before.
And he sure didn’t recall turning down it.
Jezebel whirled around. “A trap!”
She glared at Eliot, angry, then took her eyes off him and searched the passage . . . whose entrance now turned away at a right angle . . . an angle that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
The shadows in the alley grew longer.
The buildings leaned toward one another, limiting how much light filtered down. It was as if the space around them was as pliable as molding clay.
“See?” Jezebel said. “I told you! They’ve come for me. Run—while you can.”
He reached into his pack, flipped open his violin case, and grabbed Lady Dawn. Eliot set bow to strings, and the air stilled.
“I’m sticking with you,” he told her.
“I cannot believe how stubborn . . . ,” she muttered under her breath, gritting her teeth until they ground out the rest of her words.
They were no longer alone. Eliot could feel the presence in the shadows surrounding them.
A dozen black eyes stared from the dark—pulling themselves from the flat dimensionless shadow planes.
These things had long limbs that terminated into chitinous points. Where they touched brick and asphalt, they left gouges and sounded like a herd of cats running over blackboards. Their heads were smooth and tapered and split open to reveal a grin of countless shark teeth.
Jezebel faced them. Her hands up in a fighting stance, she stepped next to Eliot so they stood back to back.
“Droogan-dors,” she whispered. “Do not let them pierce you. Their poison turns flesh into smoke.”
For a heartbeat, Eliot froze, wanted to do nothing but run—but there was no way he was leaving Jezebel to fight alone.
He played the first thing that sprang into his mind, the “The March of the Suicide Queen.” He jumped to a part about a third of the way into the piece—allegro—bowing until his fingers blurred—the battle charge: it spoke of horses racing toward the enemy line, knights with lances leveled—impacting upon the enemy and breaking bodies, splintering wood, shattering bone, trampling deeper into the fray.
In his mind he heard those soldiers sing:
We shall never show mercy
We shall ask no quarter.
We spill rivers of blood
Gallop through blade and mortar.
Hoofbeats echoed off the alley walls. The dust stirred and white ghost horses appeared with headless riders charging at a full gallop—passed through Eliot and Jezebel—but solidly tramped over the nearest creatures.
The Droogan-dors went down, stabbing the phantom horses and knights.
The horses screamed as gaping holes of darkness appeared, consuming them . . . but not before they trampled the creatures, with shell-splitting crunches and wet grinding splats.
Two of the creatures jumped at Jezebel. She slashed out—her fingernails now long claws.
The Droogan-dors reared back, the cuts along their bodies swelled and blistered from poison. They writhed on the ground, screaming, and turned to smoke.
The remaining Droogan-dors backed off, whispering among themselves.
“They’re leaving,” Eliot said. “We can get out.”
“No,” Jezebel said, “there are never so few. That was merely a test. There is no way to survive this.”
The shadows multiplied with blinking eyes, scraping, rasping points, and leering smiles . . . and Eliot saw a hundred more of them . . . all smiling from the dark.
28
SHADOW LEGION
Fiona returned from the girls’ restroom and found Mitch where she’d left him on the library steps. Robert was there talking to him.
Her first instinct was to walk away. She and Mitch were supposed to get some coffee and swap notes—all innocent enough, but how could she do that in front of Robert, with him and her all tangled up in League politics? He’d get the wrong idea.
But maybe it wasn’t the wrong idea.
She did like Mitch . . . although at this point, it was more of a theoretical “like” than anything